Iʻm making lists and checking them twice. And the exercise is kind of eye-opening. So let me think out loud.

I started with a question related to my teaching experience. I teach a course called “American Musical Soundscapes.” So I thought, out of fun, if I were to draw up a gallery of 6-8 prominent composers over the 20th century, who would I include? My off-the-cuff list started like this:

Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Philip Glass, Leonard Bernstein . . . uh, five men. Who are possible women for inclusion? Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson . . . Yes, many more, but how many have achieved the kind of stature as the first five men whose names automatically began the list?

Then I tried “songwriters”–songs are on a different scale from the kind of compositions by the above group. My off-the-cuff list started like this:

So then, thinking in terms of parallel universes–what would a list of songwriters in Hawaiian music look like? Again, note–this is off the cuff, off the top of my head. Iʻm trying to call some attention to a kind of process here.